races of the northern part of the continent.[1] "The belief of the narrators and listeners in every wild and improbable thing told helps wonderfully, in the original stories, in joining all parts together. The Indian believes that the whole visible and invisible creation is animated. . . . To make the matter worse, these tribes believe that animals of the lowest as well as highest class in the chain of creation are alike endowed with reasoning powers and faculties. As a natural conclusion, they endow birds, beasts, and all other animals with souls." As an example of the ease with which the savage recognises consciousness and voluntary motion even in stones, may be cited Kohl's account of the beliefs of the Objibeways.[2] Nearly every Indian has discovered, he says, an object in which he places special confidence, and to which he sacrifices more zealously than to the Great Spirit. The "hope" of Otamigan (a companion of the traveller) was a rock, which once advanced to meet him, swayed, bowed, and went back again. Another Indian revered a Canadian larch, "because he once heard a very remarkable rustling in its branches." It thus appears that while the savage has a general kind of sense that inanimate things are animated, he is a good deal impressed by their conduct when he thinks that they actually display their animation. In the same way a devout modern spiritualist probably regards with more reverence a table which he has seen dancing and
- ↑ Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, i. 41.
- ↑ Kohl, Wanderings Round Lake Superior, pp. 58–59; Müller, Amerikan. Urrelig., pp. 62–67.
